Welcome! You have accidentally reached the blog of a heteroclite follower of Jesus: dave wainscott. I'm
"pushing toward the unobvious" as I post thinkings/linkings
re: Scripture, church and culture. Hot topics include: temple tantrums, time travel, sexuality/spirituality, U2kklesia, role of the pastor, God-haunted music/art..and subversive videos like these.

"Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being
split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take
their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes.... Artists
at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites
together. But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve
this purpose, they are the artists of living. To my mind these last are
the supreme heroes in our soulless society.
"- Irene Clairmont de Castillejo, quoted in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Coporate America

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

"a heart that is broken/is a heart that is open" -U2, Cedarwood Road

Steve Stockman writes:

One of
the things that stands out on this new U2 record is the personal raw
emotion of the songs. The heart of the record is where the hurt is, to
paraphrase an old Bono line. From Iris (Hold Me Close) to Cedarwood Road
we are on a 4 song sequence that is a painful journey from tragic
personal loss to the door that opened for redemption to be found. I
believe it to be the heart of the album. To record an album of songs of
youth is nothing new to U2. "Boy" was
exactly that but it was actually written in their youth as they left the
exit door from adolescence. These songs have been thirty five years in
the bubbling, brooding and making sense of. Where the other songs on Songs Of Innocence are also crucial building blocks that made Bono a man, this little section from Iris to Cedarwood Road are the trauma, the deepest fault lines of Bono’s shaping. Song For Someone is also a crucial building block but let us work through Iris to Cedarwood Road and get back to there. link--------------

"U2: Seeking An Ecclesiology" by Tripp Hudgins for Sojourners-excerpt:

...What I want you to see is this post from
the New Yorker. Do we truly have a "Church of U2" and is it in the
cloud as well as the arenas around the globe? Can they send their sonic
tracts anywhere they want? With 33 million downloads, is this a form of evangelism or is it simply "offering something beautiful?"It
is so wed with making money to support the mammoth (and fading) music
industry, that it's hard to know where the market begins and the
ekklesia ends.

Of course, trying to disentangle those two is always a right mess. Ask Henry VIII. It ain' easy.

The
story of U2 might be this: having begun as a band that was uncertain
about the idea of pursuing a life of faith through music, they have
resolved that uncertainty. Their thin ecclesiology has become thick. Today,
they are their own faith community; they even have a philanthropic arm,
which has improved the lives of millions of people. They know they made
the right choice, and they seem happy. Possibly, their growing comfort
is bad for their art. But how long could they have kept singing the same
song of yearning and doubt? “I waited patiently for the Lord,” Bono
sings, in the band’s version of Psalm 40. “He inclined and heard my
cry.”

Yeah. There
it is. And the connection to the new album? Here: "It expresses a
particular combination of faith and disquiet, exaltation and
desperation, that is too spiritual for rock but too strange for
church—classic U2."

Right. There.

There
is our "authenticity." There is the new ecclesiology that we see
emerging. It is not an institution in the brick and mortar sense. No, it
is an aesthetic. It is "authenticity' that is too spiritual for rock (the pure market) but too strange for church (sorry, Pope Francis).

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Great article in New Yorker, The Church of U2:...almost every U2 album contains a song about their decision to belong to a band rather than a church. (“One,” for example, is about the challenges of joining together with your friends to try and find God on your own.).. ...The tension in spiritual life—between discipline and vulnerability, order and openness, being willful and giving in—became U2’s central preoccupation, and gave it its aesthetic.....most of the time, when Bono uses the words “love,” “she,” “you,” or “baby”—which he does often—a listener can hear “God” instead..

..People sometimes sway to “With or Without You” at weddings, but the “you” isn’t a romantic partner (the line about seeing “the thorn twist in your side” should be a giveaway); the song is about how the intense demands of faith are both intolerable and invaluable (“I can’t live / With or without you”). “The Fly,” on “Achtung Baby,” seems a little overwrought as a love song, but as a song about the writing of the Gospels it’s surprisingly concrete (“Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, / All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief”). “Until the End of the World” is meaningless until you realize that it’s a love song for Jesus, sung by Judas, as portrayed by Bono. (This becomes especially obvious when the song is juxtaposed with scenes from “The Passion of the Christ.”) The best of these songs may be “Ultra Violet (Light My Way),” which sounds like it’s about a desperate romance, but is actually about the cruelty of God’s reticence:

You bury your treasure where it can’t be found,But your love is like a secret that’s been passed around.There is a silence that comes to a houseWhere no one can sleep.I guess it’s the price of love; I know it’s not cheap.

In the chorus, Bono alludes to the Book of Job (“Baby, baby, baby, light my way”), while the Edge offers a metaphor for the near-invisibility of God (“ultraviolet love”). On their recent “U2 360°” tour, the band came up with a clever visual metaphor for the song’s big idea: Bono wears a jacket trimmed in red lasers that point out into the crowd. It’s a pained, incomplete aura—trashy, but beautiful.

U2’s best songs were written during these years—roughly from 1986, when they began recording “The Joshua Tree,” to 1997, the year “Pop” (which is actually very good) was released. But there was a problem: the songs depended for their power on the dramatization of Bono’s ambivalence about God. Onstage, he theatrically performed his doubt: on the “ZooTV” tour, in support of “Achtung Baby,” Bono regularly dressed up as the devil, singing songs of romantic-religious anguish in costume. That anguish was genuine, but there was something unseemly about his flaunting of faith and doubt. It was a peep show in which, instead of showing a little leg, Bono teased us with his spiritual uncertainty. In a song called “Acrobat,” on “Achtung Baby,” he accused himself of hypocrisy: “I must be an acrobat / To talk like this and act like that.” He quoted Delmore Schwartz: “In dreams begin responsibilities.”

U2 have continued to write songs of doubt (“Wake Up Dead Man,” off “Pop,” is especially good). But they are no longer wild, ludic, and unhinged in the way they talk about God. There used to be something improvisational and risky about their spirituality—it seemed as though it might go off the rails, veering into anger or despair. Now, for the most part, they focus on a positive message, expressed directly and without ambiguity. The band’s live shows have a liturgical feel: Bono, who regularly interpolates hymns and bits of Scripture into his live performances, leads the congregation with confidence.

On their most recent albums, including “Songs of Innocence”—which Sasha Frere-Jones, the magazine’s pop music critic, reviewed last week—Bono sings about religious subjects with the kind of unfussy directness that, perversely, makes the songs less open to the resolutely secular. Two songs on the new album, “Every Breaking Wave” and “Song for Someone,” express rich ideas about God—in the first case, the paradoxical idea that, to really sink into faith, you have to stop questing after new experiences of it; in the second, the idea that fleeting moments of religious feeling, even when they don’t make sense in your own life, might be a “song for someone” you don’t know, perhaps someone in need, or some other version of yourself. These songs aim for clarity but end up being uncommunicative; they aren’t rough enough around the edges, and so there’s nothing to grab on to if you’re not already interested. If you aren’t listening carefully, it’s easy to think they’re about nothing.

The story of U2 might be this: having begun as a band that was uncertain about the idea of pursuing a life of faith through music, they have resolved that uncertainty. Their thin ecclesiology has become thick. Today, they are their own faith community; they even have a philanthropic arm, which has improved the lives of millions of people.

I don't know where to file Jason Sebastian Russo himself spiritually. From my first glnce at his lyrics on the Hopewell and The Birds of Appetite CD, I said, "Wow, there is a Godhaunted man who obviously grew up in church." Articles and interview do often mention that he grew up in "very religious" home, but nowhere is the tradition specified. Russo: "I grew up in a really religious household where we were taught that
the world is going to hell, Satan was going to be released from his
chains and we probably would have to live in the basement and eat the
cat to survive. " Hmm, That doesn't sound very Catholic, but strangely he speaks of childhood church services as "mass".

JR:Hopewell
definitely focuses on the transcendental, and Common Prayer sticks around the house.
The sanctity of the mundane..

I think it's safe to say that the two bands are trying to arrive at the same
place by going in opposite directions. One going out, one going in. After enough
interstellar travel, you start to notice that the pattern is self-replicating. The
more you zoom out to take in the data, the more the picture keep resolving to be the
same basic shape. As above so below. Perhaps it's just a matter of scale..

Question: You've said 'I say a prayer to everything going.' Is this a matter of
not holding on, being open to everything; finding wonder in the new, to keep moving?

JR: At some point, I realized that what my parents call God, I call "everything
going how everything goes" - so, prayer. link

Greg Clarke on the miracle in the U2 bloodstream :The new U2 album –Songs of Innocence– is gorgeous. It’s instantly familiar, obviously U2 and deeply Christian. This continued

-----------

On first take, the latest U2 album still offers grace

The band’s latest release is theologically rich, though subtler than its earlier work. By Steven Harmon link

--

by RevNathanHart:that in fact the album had been paid for, just not by the listeners. Apple Corporation paid the price. “I don’t believe in free music,” Bono said, “music is a sacrament.”

The power of Songs of Innocence is found within its sacramental atmosphere. There are holy moments throughout. With very personal and vulnerable lyrics, Bono has (probably temporarily) laid down his political megaphone. It feels less like a prophetic diatribe and more like a prayer of confession. link

If one were to seek the great archetypal precursor for prophetic Christian thinker championing the soul's return from the spiritual exile of Enlightenment rationalism, William Blake comes very close to casting the mold. Condemned as heretical by some and as too orthodox by others, he was one of the first to point out exactly how the new sciences were distorting the role of the imagination in human affairs and putting the soul to sleep.

Altizer and Hamilton..described Blake's contribution to Western thought

Blake was the first of the modern seers. Through Blake we can sense the theological significance of a poetic reversal of our mythical traditions, and become open to the possibility that the uniquely modern metamorphosis of the sacred into the profane is the culmination of a redemptive and kenotic movement of the Godhead

This, I think, is an essentially accurate description of Blake's intellectual influence.
I would, however, reverse the figure and the field. Blake does not celebrate the sacred becoming profane, but the profane becoming sacred.

....Blake reminds us again and again that true knowledge--that is to say, knowledge of our ontological status as creatures made in the image of God--cannot be grasped by calculation; only through a vision. And vision--in its most concentrated and inclusive firm --is what psychoanalysts call the "imago," an internal picture that transform s facts into meanings..

..His theme is that the church lost its radical energy by giving up its apocalyptic vision for a more accommodating set of doctrines, and so the church became more hierarchical and tradition-bound at the very moment it should have become more democratic and imaginative..

Christian thought critiques mainstream culture but also sees itself under judgment; our best modern Christian intellectuals have turned thinking against themselves into a veritable art form: from Blake to Dostoyevsky, from Kierkegaard to Chesterton, all the way to Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, the exemplary mode of Christian thought has been a triadic structure of self-reflection, paradox and irony that reverses the values of this world and the logic of cause and effect pp 19-28, 178

One of my fantasies for some time has been offering a retreat based around how U2 have worked and reworked “I Will Follow” over their career. Their 29 years of changes to this song track a classic spiritual pilgrimage: from seeking to fervor to sending to struggle to reconciliation. The constants have been the chorus and verse structure, Larry’s drums, Edge’s relentless two-string assault, and Bono’s stalker chant: a minor third in the verses and one obsessive note in the chorus. But so much else has morphed from year to year.

The lyrics are an obvious example. As the seasons of U2’s work pass, is it a “mother” or “lover” in verse 2? “They pulled the four walls down,” or “you tore my four walls down”? Is the narrator’s predicament being “lost,” “caught at a stoplight,” or “chased by amazing grace”? And does the story end neatly with him “found,” or is the verdict Popmart’s trapped, angry “you took the soul from me/you put a hole in me”? (Or do we even sing the song at all? Not on ZooTV we don’t.)

Then there’s the mood of the center bridge. The original on Boy to me comes out eerie and maybe even a tad frightening. (“Your eyes” — they fascinate me, I can’t stay away, but when I do “go in there,” what am I getting myself into? ) In the later 80s it’s a more trusting encounter, and the transition out of it turns exultant. But the whole section is summarily cut for the Pop era: not quite able to meet those eyes just now? After 2001, the bridge returns, often with an extended numinous improvisation, band and crowd hovering in the moment as
at the Elevation show in Turin: “Let the Spirit descend on this place/let the lines disappear off my face.”

Or finally the ending. “I Will Follow” concludes with a high-energy drive to the final note, but on the studio version 20-year-old Bono delivers his last word as if sleepwalking, almost as a question: “…follow…?” However, listen to a live performance just a year or so later, and caution is gone as he’s shouting “I will!”
The band rush the tempo. It’s a vow. In Popmart, he’s age 37, “I Will Follow” has become a cry of mother-loss paired with “Mofo,” and the end is broken and desperate: “Don’t walk away!” And post-midlife, during the Vertigo tour, sometimes the song actually winds up in Koine Greek: “Agape, agape.”

Stalking agape, or facing the reality that it will never stop stalking you, or renewing your vows to it as in a lifelong marriage – those kinds of relational negotiations backdrop all the different versions of “I Will Follow.” If it’s in the setlist for the upcoming tour, I’ll be looking for it to reveal yet another nuance of how four artists are living a life in love with Love.

PS an interesting exaltation i noticed during I will follow in the elevation san remo concert..."let the lines disappear on my face, let the spirit descend on this place..our spirits will never grow old..."also..i noticed a different intro than usual on the oakland Nov 15 concert to streets...."Who's gonna fall in front of Thee...Who's gonna fall in front of Thee...You have my heart. You have my heart" link

Some of you will be surprised to hear this, but I came late... really late (after they broke up)... to R.E.M. Sure, I had heard a few songs and liked them, but never owned any REM until this year. That may seem funny, but I just found an article that said you are either an REM or U2 person... well, that explains it--I have been no small U2 fan since 1980!(: But I know geniuses that I think are both (Richard S Rawls??).....So anyone chime in: Favorite REM CD or era? Love? Hate? Argue the U2 or REM theory? ANYWAY.. thanks to the 50 cent sale at Rasputin Music - Fresno... as you can see.. I now have a complete collection of studio albums for about the price of one(: I'm sure I will blog on this in a few weeks, but chime in!

Friday, September 05, 2014

I had a life-changing class with DB on Matthew, and his book on this is invaluable;
as is his (along with Robert Traina) "Inductive Bible Study" (No one less than Eugene Peterson says of the content of this book,"it would profoundly change the Bible for me, and me along with it, in ways that
gave shape to everything I have been doing for the rest of my life. This
is not an exaggeration.”)

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

"I tried to pray..I'll give it a shot" (lyrics to Filter's "Captain Bligh").

I know; I'm behind the times.

Filter is a new band to me: I heard "Skinny" the other day,
and found it captivating and spiritually moving. The band is basically Richard Patrick and whoever rallies around for a given album.season.

For someome who claims to (no longer?) be a believer..I wonder if he doth prostest too much.

Pretty God-haunted.

Even though Captain Bligh is supposed to be about Patrick's leaving his former band (NIN):
to me it smells like another singer (Peter Gabriel)'s song ("Solsbury Hill") that is officially about him leaving his former band (Genesis)..but reads like a journal following a God-encounter.

Even though one album is "Anthems for the Damned," it feels like a pulling a Johnny Cash.

After shows, we stay until everyone who wants an autograph gets one. The biggest rock stars are all nice guys: Bono, Mick Jagger," he says.

Since it's agnostic Carl Sagan's birthday, I ask him how his own
agnosticism influenced the new album. As far back as Filter's first
release, Patrick has peppered his songs with jabs at organized religion,
but on The Trouble With Angels he's more direct, like he's no
longer pulling his punches. "Did you hear the one about heaven? There's a
guy that's running the sky," he sings on the title track.

"Science
is awesome," he says, displaying an almost childlike enthusiasm for the
natural world that's infectious when you're in his presence. "I can see
beauty in the rings of Saturn. Why does there have to be a reason for
everything?" He's a non-believer in religion and a believer in science.
He launches into a lengthy diatribe on the theory of evolution, ending
with, "How much more proof do you need?"

His wife is a Christian.
"She's moderate, she prays at night," Patrick says. If everyone was like
his wife, he says, he wouldn't have as much of a problem with religion;
it's the fanatics that get under his skin. link

Dumb disclaimer:

It should go without saying...but i wouldn't want it to... that since this blog is a Spiritaneous place to throw out thoughts/feelings/articles "in process," it does not represent any of the fine institutions you see by my profile that I am affiliated with (Heck, it may not even represent me! (:........). The blog is merely an attempt to subvert subversion and "push toward the unobvious" (Thanks, Tim N. for that phrase) on the six hot topics listed at the top of the page....Welcome, engage it, and don't be offended (for the wrong reason, anyway!)